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7 Women (1966, John Ford)
First, it’s actually 8 Women; Jane Chang doesn’t count because she’s not white. Though I suppose it could just be counting good Christian women, then Anne Bancroft doesn’t count. Women is a Western, just one set nearer to modernity and not in the American West. Instead, it’s about a mission in China on the border… 📖
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My Life Is Murder (2019) s02e04 – Look Don’t Touch
It may just be the museum setting or Lucy Lawless making fun of a woman with a dog in a stroller at the beginning of the episode, but I’m really on board with this season of “My Life is Murder.” The actual big difference—besides giving Lawless some backstory to drive her character and the move… 📖
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Evil (2019) s02e09 – U Is for U.F.O.
Remember last season when the “Evil” team discovered a fertility clinic in Manhattan infusing babies with concentrated evil—no doubt imported from the Prince of Darkness church—including one of star Katja Herbers’s daughters? It was a big deal plot then. This season it’s been barely acknowledged, then this whole episode is about getting the show back… 📖
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Casino (1995, Martin Scorsese)
The best part of Casino isn’t my favorite part of Casino because the best part is James Woods bickering with Erika von Tagen. It’s mainly in the background, and it’s the only time anywhere in the film anyone shows any personality not expressly required for their scenes. Director (and co-screenwriter) Scorsese doesn’t believe in background… 📖
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My Life Is Murder (2019) s02e03 – All That Glitters
“My Life is Murder” has seven more episodes this season, and it’s entirely unclear how much more they can reveal about Lucy Lawless’s character by the end. In this episode, we find out not only does she have a brother (Martin Henderson), he’s a con man (a professional one like their dad), he’s in prison,… 📖
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What We Do in the Shadows (2019) s03e03 – Gail
I’m feeling a lot better about this season. Or, more accurately, I feel like I don’t have to worry about this season. Given the significant changes—filming during Rona, Jemaine Clement leaving the writers room—I’d forgotten the standard season-to-season change. They’ve been away for a while, the momentum’s slowed, the energy’s changed. But they’re doing just… 📖
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Annette (2021, Leos Carax)
Right up until the end, it seems like Annette will maintain some level of success solely due to the audacity of the project. It’s a musical set in Hollywood, where an edge lord white male comedian (Adam Driver) marries a beloved singer (Marion Cotillard). Only he’s got a shelf life because he’s always trying to… 📖
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What If…? (2021) s01e04 – What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?
Apparently, at some point, if you’ve been a superhero long enough—in this case, Benedict Cumberbatch, who’s five years in—you eventually end up in a junkyard having a Superman III fight; wait, so was Christopher Reeve. Anyway, in this universe, Rachel McAdams is not a disposable girlfriend character in Doctor Strange; she’s the all-powerful girlfriend in… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s06e19 – IQ
What I can’t figure out with episode director David Lee, whose name I’ve come to dread this season, is the obviously uneven enthusiasm. This episode’s got a couple literal set pieces—there’s an auction scene and a restaurant scene (in addition to the apartment)—and there’s a lot of detail during those sequences but the blandest three-camera… 📖
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Legends of Tomorrow (2016) s06e15 – The Fungus Amongus
“Legends” ends this season with a cast change-up—ten main characters were too many, so they’re reducing to eight. One of the goodbyes is more surprising than the other, though only one of them gets anywhere near the attention it deserves. The other receives a rush job. Can’t really get into details without spoiling. There’s also… 📖
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The Great Ziegfeld (1936, Robert Z. Leonard)
Second-billed Myrna Loy shows up in The Great Ziegfeld at around the two-hour mark. The film runs three hours. The about a half-hour of it is musical numbers; they’re presumably recreations of the actual Ziegfeld stage productions, but even without having read the Wikipedia article first, it’s obvious Ziegfeld’s a glorifying tribute. Loy’s most significant… 📖
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Evil (2019) s02e08 – B Is for Brain
“Evil” has definitely hit the part of the production run when they knew they were streaming only. The F-bombs come in dialogue and not in voiceover or inserts. And Katja Herbers’s journey to wherever gets to be a lot more intense. Well, maybe. I don’t know; would CBS have let them do cross-shaped burns on… 📖
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What We Do in the Shadows (2019) s03e02 – The Cloak of Duplication
The episode opens with a lengthy, hilarious bit of Harvey Guillén mocking Kayvan Novak’s lack of self-awareness. It’s terrific. And then there’s immediately another strong punchline bit when the cast returns to the Vampiric Council building to get a grand tour. Kristen Schaal’s around for the tour and that second strong punchline—as well as a… 📖
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What We Do in the Shadows (2019) s03e01 – The Prisoner
I wasn’t apprehensive about this season of “What We Do in the Shadows,” but there are a couple changes to this season I couldn’t help but think about as this episode kicked off. First, show creator and original movie co-creator Jemaine Clement isn’t involved in a writing capacity this season, which may take a while… 📖
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Superman & Lois (2021) s01e03 – The Perks of Not Being a Wallflower
I feel like they’ve got to know the muscle suit is unimpressive because they’re going out of their way not to dwell on it or to cut straight from long shot to close-up. And this episode’s director, Gregory Smith, definitely seems to have the Superman imagery in mind, as the episode opens with a nod… 📖
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My Life Is Murder (2019) s02e02 – Oceans Apart
On the one hand, the previous episode spent a lot of time reuniting Lucy Lawless and sidekick Ebony Vagulans to break them up here; this episode, Vagulans has hurt her leg while at a water park trying to stay cool because Lawless won’t get an air conditioner. So Vauglans is in the apartment for all… 📖
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Superman & Lois (2021) s01e02 – Heritage
I’ll just admit I’m sort of rooting for “Superman & Lois.” Nothing outrageous like making my wife sit through it, but I’d like it to go well enough I can keep watching it. I’ve liked Elizabeth Tulloch’s Lois Lane, I’ve been OK with Tyler Hoechlin’s Superman. Now, they’re the only things with any continuity to… 📖
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My Life Is Murder (2019) s02e01 – Call of the Wild
One can only feel so bleeding edge TV hip when watching shows from other countries when it turns out they’ve actually changed countries, and one—c’est moi—has no idea. This season of “My Life is Murder” takes place in Auckland, which is in New Zealand. Last season took place in Melbourne (Australia)—also, the whole “Mel-bin” pronunciation… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s06e18 – Taps at the Montana
Sometimes marathoning “hurts” a traditional broadcast show. They were meant to be watched weeks or months apart, with commercial breaks distracting and obfuscating tropes. They’re not meant to be strung together. But even with those caveats, it’s kind of weird “Frasier” did an episode about a dinner party right after doing an episode called The… 📖
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Legends of Tomorrow (2016) s06e14 – There Will Be Brood
It’s a very, very busy episode. Even though nothing really fulfills its potential, director (and former series regular—who doesn’t cameo) Maisie Richardson-Sellers keeps things moving at a satisfactory pace. It’s not until the end of the episode you realize how little the main team has been in it. Instead, in addition to resolving evil Matt… 📖
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Superman & Lois (2021) s01e01
There’s a lot going on with “Superman & Lois” before we even get to Tyler Hoechlin wearing the worst Arrowverse muscle suit in memory. There’s also Hoechlin wearing spandex dress shirts to look more ripped. There’s also the zero Arrowverse crossover aspect—Melissa Benoist really should’ve shown for her aunt’s funeral, and Hoechlin’s recap of his… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s06e17 – The Dinner Party
Turns out I’ve been bullish episodes where Jeffrey Richman gets the script credit. I thought his name was on my unenumerated list of problematic “Frasier” writers. And this episode certainly has a bunch of problematic elements. Lots of misogynistic jokes, some fat-shaming, and I think some other ableism. It’s also a “sitcom as continuous” play… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s06e16 – Decoys
This episode starts as a Crane boys outing—David Hyde Pierce has just found out he’s gotten a lake house in his divorce and is taking brother Kelsey Grammer and dad John Mahoney up for the weekend—and ends up being a light screwball comedy of errors. Hyde Pierce has brought Peri Gilpin up in hopes of… 📖
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Evil (2019) s02e07 – S Is for Silence
Silence is a humdinger of a concept episode. It’s so good it doesn’t even matter at least two plot questions never get resolved or even seriously addressed. However, one of them presumably will come up later in the season, involving an unexpected character. The team is investigating a possible sainthood at a monastery. It’s a… 📖
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What If…? (2021) s01e03 – What If… the World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?
What a profoundly stinky stinker of an episode. And not just because the writing is terrible (script credit to A.C. Bradley and Matthew Chauncey), the animation is sparse and cheap, and Lake Bell does a terrible job voicing Black Widow. Because everything about it is bad. Down to the villain reveal. “What If… the World… 📖
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What If…? (2021) s01e02 – What If… T’Challa Became a Star-Lord?
This episode of “What If” answers the burning question… what if Guardians of the Galaxy hadn’t been an attempt to reach the blandest white bread audience in the Marvel Universe? What if they’d hired an actually charming leading man instead of Chris Pratt? And, as I’ll never pass up an opportunity to diss the worst… 📖
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Beverly Hills Cop (1984, Martin Brest)
Beverly Hills Cop opens with a montage of Detroit street scenes. Kids playing, people talking, walking, Black and white. It’s beautifully cut—even at its most tediously cop action movie procedural, the editing is always glorious (though there’s lots of technical magnificence in Cop—and is well-done enough you even forgive the film for Glenn Frey’s The… 📖
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Legends of Tomorrow (2016) s06e13 – Silence of the Sonograms
I wish Matt Ryan weren’t so good as a softie. He’s almost against type these days as John Constantine, this suffering devoted boyfriend who tries not to gaslight or yell when disagreeing with girlfriend Tala Ashe. The dialogue on their romantic problems—she finds out he’s been lying to her again, hiding his addiction to evil… 📖
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MASH (1970, Robert Altman)
MASH is timelessly white liberal. There’s even a lovable Southerner (Tom Skerritt) who knows in that science way Black folks are just folks, but he still wants to be a dick about it. And his white male Northeastern elitist friends, Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould, are totally fine with that bigotry because, you know, it’s… 📖
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Superman ’78 (2021) #1
Superman ‘78 starts with a dedication page to Richard Donner, which would feel better if the comic were better. But, instead, entire sequences are just lifted from… Superman: The Movie? I mean, there are a couple continuity-building nods to Superman II (Lois Lane likes Metropolis hot dogs, not just Niagara Falls ones). However, you’d think… 📖
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Rowlf (1971)
Rowlf is the story of a very good dog named Rowlf who does not play the piano but is devoted to his owner, the fair maiden Maryara. Maryana’s sort of royalty, just of an impoverished land. So her best suitor ends up being a twerp who wants to assume command and lead the land to… 📖
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Legends of Tomorrow (2016) s06e12 – Bored on Board Onboard
The episode finishes with four actual cliffhangers—two characters are unconscious, one has a secret revealed, and Caity Lotz has walked in on something shocking not involving any of the other three. The implication is even the return of the season big bad–“Legends” only has three episodes left this season, and so this episode’s definitely sending… 📖
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Reminiscence (2021, Lisa Joy)
I did give Reminiscence a fair shake. I really did. It’s not my fault it opens with an all-CGI “helicopter” shot introducing the setting—a future, flooded Miami—and a terrible voice-over from star Hugh Jackman. It’s writer and director Joy’s fault. And her producers. And whoever thought doing low-to-middling CGI on a fake helicopter shot was… 📖
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Black Star (2021)
The cynic in me can’t help thinking Black Star started as a movie screenplay. Writer Eric Anthony Glover has a bunch of narrative devices to exposition dump—there aren’t just flashbacks, there are talking omnipotent computers who playback the flashbacks. Nintendo Power Gloves with screens built-in. The computer, “Guardian” not “Mother,” tells the characters where to… 📖
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Lone Star (1996, John Sayles)
Lone Star is Texas Gothic. There’s nowhere else the story plays the same way except a border town, at no time other than when it does; it’s all about the sins of the mothers and fathers playing out. Actual sins, imagined sins, hidden sins. It’s about heroes and villains and how they’re the same thing.… 📖
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Four-Fisted Tales: Animals in Combat (2021)
Creator Ben Towles toes (no pun) a very tight line with Four-Fisted Tales: Animals in Combat. How do you do a graphic novel about war animals in 2021? If I had to guess the target audience—like professionally, which is an odd flex for me but Animals is excellent for reluctant readers—but the target audience it’s… 📖
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What If…? (2021) s01e01 – What If… Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?
One of the joys of an old What If comic was seeing how the epilogue played out. Spider-Man ends up with eight arms and eating New York, whatever. The show’s apparently not going to do interesting epilogues because they want to bring in big-name guest stars from the major properties. So instead of Hayley Atwell… 📖
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Pig (2021, Michael Sarnoski)
Pig is an anti-noir. Writer and director Sarnoski sets it up as something of a neo-noir in the first act, with seemingly inscrutable modern-day hermit Nicolas Cage having to travel back to civilization and civilization being scared of him. And even though Cage’s adventure routes through shady settings, they’re just background to the actual journey… 📖
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Batman ’89 (2021) #1
I haven’t read any of the previous DC comics sequels to their TV or movie properties—I think it’s just been TV properties, right (“Batman” and “Wonder Woman”)—but I’m certainly sympathetic to the proposition. I did, after all, read the ostensible canon IDW Star Trek: The JJ Abrams Years series for a while. But Batman ’89…… 📖